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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

So how common is lithium on earth anyway? Is it like the new oil? Can we make it in the lab? Will we wage war over it? Will we deplete it? Can we find it on the moon or Mars?

*) Lithium on Mars? https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1208.6311D/abstra...).

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It is the 33rd most abundant element on earth. However, as it is highly reactive it is never found in its pure form in nature, and right now, we extract it from mineral rich brine from lakes. This process uses a lot of water, approximately 500,000 gallons of water goes into extracting 1 ton of lithium, enough to make 190,000 smartphones.

I think we’ll wage war over water before we wage one over Lithium.

Bush and Gates families already stacking waterrights and farmlands.

What happens to the water after production? Can it be recycled?

In the process described above its evaporated. Other processes that are in development pump it back into the underground brine (just a little less salty).

What is relevant here is that this is salty brine water, not drinking water.

And the water usage is very different for what we are talking about here. This is not a brine mine, but a spodumene rock mine. That uses far less water.

Lithium is only created in stellar events (Big Bang, super novas). There’s no natural way for it form on Earth.

As a result all lithium deposits we’re created during the formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the planet is pretty even. There’s no “hot spots” of high concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to its land mass.

That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it’s unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense. Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than fight for someone’s backyard that has the same dirt in it.

>there’s no natural way for it form on Earth.

'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium fission products.

Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat evenly.

One difference is that it can be recovered from worn out lithium batteries. So at some point we could theoretically have enough lithium from recycled batteries that we no longer need to mine a significant amount of it.

It's fairly common. Known reserves amount to around 80 million tons. Yearly production is around 100k tons.

I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around 1.7m tons in 2030.

I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass on, and I don't think that's going to hold.

Is it really that much money? It’s not like that’s pure profit; mining requires large up-front capital investment to even start. Break that down to 20 years (round number for illustration purposes only, seemingly on the quick side based on quick searching), and you’re down to $75mm/year which begins to sound like a lot less money when you start adding the recurring costs of operation to the initial capital cost. Add in the state mandates for damage escrow and you’re probably looking at a business that makes the owners wealthy, but otherwise produces only a handful of jobs and minimal tax revenue while permanently destroying some of the natural beauty of a state heavy on tourism that relies on that beauty.

Put another way: if it was a lot of money they’d find a way to do it underground.

There really isn’t that much lithium in today’s “Lithium ion” batteries. A few percent by weight. Much more Nickel, Cobalt, Aluminum, Carbon, Copper, and Iron than Lithium. Lithium metal anodes would push that number up but that flavor hasn’t really solved it’s lifespan problems yet.

Stating there isn't much lithium in a single cell isn't really meaningful; there are a lot of individual batteries, and the number keeps growing, so we still require a lot of lithium to be mined. Relatively less than other minerals, but still a significant amount and still destructive to the local area where lithium is mined.

my understanding is that it is super common, but not very concentrated in the earth. As a result it makes mining more difficult. You don't just find a ore vein in a cave, you have to dig up and process tons of stone in a wider area.

The sea is the largest resource of lithium. It's just cheaper to dig it for now.

Considering everything and their dog now runs on some sort of lithium ion battery, it very much is the new oil.

I don't see why wars wouldn't be fought over it, certainly has been the case for oil.

It is not an energy source though. So the comparison to oil is at least a bit flawed if you ask me.

It's an intermediary source and it doesn't care where that energy came from. The oil analogy is not that far fetched if you consider that both are tied to a geographic location where they needs to be extracted.

That's likely true if you look at network effects, but maybe not so true if you look at energy return on energy invested (ERoEI). In my opinion, the latter is a big part of oil's status as a "universal" energy source/carrier.

As a factorio player, energy storages are as important as energy source itself. Especially for renewables since the energy sources are practically unlimited (and the efficiencies are increasing) but very fluctuate.

And if you see from other perspective, oil are both energy storage and energy source, which is "almost" equivalent with solar cells and batteries.

As I said in my other reply, I think the difference is really ERoEI. And that's very likely an important difference. Because you wouldn't get an economical system if you're not able to get a competitive ERoEI from the whole system (including storage). I suspect to take oil's status you'd therefore have to have something that allows you to also cheaply get the energy, not only store it.

Lithium as an input to storage is really just a small part of the whole picture. Like a barrel is for oil.

War over lithium would be totally insane. Every continent has basically unlimited amount of lithium.

Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.

Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.

Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.

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